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Having done a chunk of non trivial perl 6 coding (A Scheme Interpreter), I can tell you that it 'feels' like Perl. My general feeling was along the lines of "Why can't I do this in Perl now", and not just for the// operator. given/when, the new subroutine prototyping rules, lexically scoped subs and all the rest just felt right.

I've argued that this language is still Perl in the sense that the code (as Piers says above) still feels a lot like Perl. Remember that the stuff always being talked about are the differences not what has stayed the same.

I've argued (recently, with limited success) that Perl 6 is Perl because Perl is the community and the devlopers, not any one bit of software or code.

However, I've also argued quite a lot that maybe it should have a different name (if just

The Apocalypses and Exegeses can easily give that impression. But so can reading perldelta for any particular release of Perl 5. And the reason is the same: those documents are all about what is changing, and rarely mention what is staying the same (because then they'd be 10 times longer!)

But Perl 6 really is Perl. It feels like Perl to program in, and most of its syntax and semantics are identical to those of Perl 5.

I found "...And Now" a very reassuring document - If the examples are typical of the amount of conversion necessary then we have little to fear. I hope that Damian will be able to update the document or produce additional ones when the regex details are finalised.

Disclaimer: I work at the reg*.{[hc],sym} like a novice alchemist:
I pour the blue liquid on the red liquid. If it doesn't blow up on my
face, I proceed to turn up the flame under the blue liquid, and so on.
I have very little idea of what I am really doing, I just like the
pretty colors :-)
-- Jarkko Hietaniemi

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